


The Woman in White

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F, Urban Legends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2019-10-13
Packaged: 2020-12-14 02:55:56
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21008564
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: The Woman in White haunts the cemetery and terrorizes passing motorists.





	The Woman in White

**Author's Note:**

> October challenge: urban legend.

x Last Friday x

“It was so foggy he couldn’t be sure he’d seen what or who he thought he’d seen—”

“Whom,” Roz says.

Theo lowers the flashlight illuminating his face, says,

“What?”

“‘Whom he thought he’d seen.’”

Sabrina and Theo both roll their eyes, and Theo raises the flashlight again.

“Anyway. He might or might not have seen someone, and that someone was little more than shadow and specter in the cold, wet night. The motorist was driving slowly, carefully. A shudder raced down his spine as he discerned the figure in the dark was a woman, a white gown clinging to her in the damp air, and he skidded to a stop.”

An owl hoots somewhere in the distance, and all three startle a tad. Theo continues:

“He had stopped the car just past the graveyard, and in his periphery the figure glided preternaturally, hands thrown above her head in apparent frustration. Tentatively, trepidatiously, he rolled down the passenger side window.

“‘Miss?’ he said.” Theo’s voice has taken on a raspy, ethereal quality. Roz and Sabrina shiver together under their shared blanket.

“‘Miss,’ he said again, slightly stronger. ‘Need a lift?’” Theo husks, and they shiver again as the flashlight’s beam wavers, and the bonfire hisses and pops.

“But the Woman in White continued her fevered searching, seemingly unaware of the motorist. Until suddenly she raised her head, and her face was a black blur as she screamed an anguished, incomprehensible scream.”

Roz and Sabrina, taken in by the narrative, give an accompanying scream, and Theo laughs.

A half moon above them, fog and chill.

They all giggle into the night.

x 1890 x

Zelda’s reading a newspaper at the dining table. As much as Father derides her for being a Blue Stocking, he does allow her this, allows her a lot of things.

They have a mortal Irish cook, who is just now bringing out the last of the breakfast trays.

Mother dabs at her sweaty forehead with her lace handkerchief. The witch change of life.

“Reading about the carriage accident last night?” Father says.

“No. The Mormons and their wives they’re to relinquish,” Zelda says.

Father laughs, and Mother tuts, and finally Edward appears and takes his seat, says,

“Where’s Hilda?”

Zelda turns the page on her newspaper as loudly as possible.

“Oh,” Edward says.

Mother puts down her handkerchief abruptly, says,

“What carriage accident? Was anyone hurt?” She’s looking at Father, and Father’s looking at Zelda. Zelda pointedly does not look up. Father clears his throat, looks back at Mother, says,

“A horse got away, I think. No injuries. Just some madman, probably drunk, thought he saw a hysterical woman running around in the graveyard and lost control of the reins.”

Edward kicks Zelda under the table.

“If you don’t like it, why do you do it?” he whispers.

“Mind your own business,” Zelda hisses.

x 1946 x

The war’s been over for months. But they’re not back to normal. What even is normal?

Hilda’s making her own vegetable stock from her modest garden and is still so stingy about her nylons.

Zelda’s gone the other direction. She has her furs updated at the nearest furrier and brings home new extravagant wines—not from town but imported.

They don’t agree, but they don’t cross each other’s paths too often. Except when they must, which is too frequent by half as far as either of them is concerned. 

Edward is High Priest and so requires their attendance at Black Mass services where he proves himself an inconsequential windbag—according to both of them but each sister has different criteria for the judgement.

Edward’s also acquired a charge, a parolee. And none of them want to admit how fond they are of him.

But even so, Zelda and Hilda resent how they’ve been forced to again share a bedroom to accommodate their brother and his ward.

They try to avoid each other. But it’s such close quarters.

A Friday evening.

“My fox cape—” Zelda starts even as Hilda is saying,

“My good silk stockings—”

They’re squaring off in their begrudgingly shared bedroom.

They both blink back a wave of deja vu and narrow their eyes at each other.

And it’s all too raw and recent but also so distant. They’re always sisters but sometimes more than others.

A silver letter opener glinting.

“How dare you—” Zelda.

“You wouldn’t dare—“ Hilda.

And then a silver letter opener to a temple.

Dark.

White.

Zelda can hardly believe what’s she’s done. Deja vu again. She hasn’t changed out of her white night dress as she paces.

Is that a carriage? Of course it’s not. It’s a  
Studebaker.

She salutes it absently, the WAC in her not obliterated yet.

The earth splits, and she finally breathes.

x 1970 x

The flower crown hasn’t even started to wilt.

Stupid. 

Hippie bullshit.

It had been a row about the Draft, about soldiers’ trauma, about cowardice and courage and tax dollars and imperialism.

And then a long chain of chunky wooden beads “better suited to pulling curtains up and down than trying to pretend to be a necklace”—as Zelda had described it—digging in, in, in to Hilda’s neck.

They’d all poked fun at Zelda for being such a Blue Stocking. And then, suddenly, her habits hadn’t seemed so rebellious when compared to Hilda’s politics that she had actually acted upon rather than merely read about.

That is before, of course.

Before the before, even.

But now most of those who’d poked fun are dead. The before and the before the before are dead.

Dead for real, rather than the temporary death Hilda currently inhabits. 

Hilda’s face is pale and serene, not waxy yet, the wooden beads now slack against her pretty, not breathing throat. And those fucking flowers in her hair.

Zelda buries her. And then stalks around the cemetery chain smoking in her caftan.

Cars pass. She waves them off.

“Get fucked,” she says under her breath. It’s as much to herself as any passerby.

x 1984 x

Hilda’s in her temporary grave again. She had voted for Reagan so it serves her right.

The fight that had put her there had been rather less political.

She’d been draped in rayon and shoulder pads, very attractive for the era, and Zelda had certainly perused and admired. 

However. That’s neither here nor there. The offensive thing had been dinner.

The mortal Irish cook had left when Mother had died just before the Great War and they hadn’t procured another, and anyway Hilda liked puttering about in the kitchen.

Hilda’s pot roast had been lackluster on this particular evening.

“You spend more time jazzercizing than anything worthwhile,” Zelda had said, poking her fork against a piece of carrot.

“And what’s worthwhile? Just what benefits you!” Hilda had said. The old Blue Stocking in her. Or had the Blue Stocking been Zelda? Hilda had been some other derisive epithet of intellectual womanhood, whatever it might have been. But all that was a long time ago. Before the before.

Regardless, it had been her final words this time around. 

Carving knife ragged against ivory neck and ivory ruffled blouse.

Zelda’s plodding along at the corners of the Cain Pit when she sees headlights in the distance. She tries to flag the car down. She’s lost her cigarette lighter somewhere, and she’s quite desperate.

“Please stop!” she cries, but the car pauses only long enough to rev its engine and then speed off again.

She trudges back, mud on her bare feet and low hem of her white nightgown.

x 1999 x

Zelda’s face is still wet from Hilda’s desire.

It had taken them too long to understand what it was, but at least they’d finally understood it.

Zelda lies on her back against a cool pillow, pointedly not touching Hilda. A long silence.

“All right, love?” Hilda says.

“Yes,” Zelda says. 

But she’s lying. Nothing’s all right, especially this.

“Forgive me if I don’t believe you,” Hilda says as she rolls to her side, hand reaching and finding Zelda’s face, cupping and stroking so tenderly.

Zelda leans into the loving touch. 

And then.

And then she’s angry about it. She doesn’t figure she deserves this tenderness in the same breath that she doesn’t figure Hilda really believes anything that she’s said or begged for, done, let be done to her. 

Surely Hilda is delusional, hallucinating, fantasizing. Surely they both are.

She’s angry about Hilda’s obviously skewed perception of reality, her own weakness, the world at large.

Y2K is imminent. Total collapse of civilization. Soon there will be a new before and a new before the before. If there’s anything at all.

Fingers around a throat. Gasping. Gasping. 

Hilda’s lifeless body. A shallow hole. 

Guilt shame regret.

Zelda stands at the foot of the grave.

A car passes on the two-lane road. 

She’s crying, but she refuses to believe it. She blames her wet face on the rain.

She runs toward the car. She’s in her white nightdress. She wails. 

It’s an anguished, incomprehensible scream.

x 2002 x

Zelda’s crying in the bathroom. She’d thought she’d been discreet. But there’s a muted rap at the door.

“Dinner’s ready, love,” Hilda’s soft, accommodating voice says.

Downstairs, in the dining room, Hilda’s got the baby in a sling against her chest, and she’s ladling stew into bowls. The sight makes Zelda want to retreat to the bathroom again.

Everyone’s dead now. Everyone but them, and so they must carry on and care for these children they’d never chosen to have. She looks at Hilda, who looks contented in it rather than resigned to it. She resents her for it. She hates herself for that resentment.

She resents Hilda and hates herself for so many things.

Edward’s half-breed child is asleep in her bassinet, and Edward’s parolee’s music’s bassline thumps overhead.

She’s haunted by Edward and his decisions.

She’s haunted by her own decisions.

“I need you tonight,” Zelda finds herself saying in the dark.

A sigh.

“We need each other.”

“Yes. But...” Zelda says.

“I’m tired, Zelds.”

“Aren’t we all?”

“Fine,” Hilda says.

But it’s not fine, and they both know it. And if they hadn’t known it, they both know it now.

Zelda in Hilda’s bed. Tongue, fingers, pressure.

“I thought we were done with that—”

It had been her final words this time around. A pinched trachea. Deja vu.

Sometimes in that moment when Zelda rips the veil, something passes between them. A life into death, a death into life, and some feeling of knowing and unknowing. Not exactly deja vu but not not deja vu, either.

Zelda’s sitting on the loose dirt of Hilda’s temporary grave, fumbling with her cigarette.

A car passes at the end of the drive. More sound than anything else. But she’s got a few hours before Hilda will extricate herself.

A hefty draft from the crystal whiskey decanter she’s brought out with her.

And now she’s trekking the drive, half drunk and all mad, weaving and winding, white nightgown clinging spasmodically to her sweaty body.

A car.

“Hey!”

Brakes squealing. Groaning. Speeding off.

x Last Saturday x

Pain au chocolat.

They can see the canvas tent from the kitchen window. Hilda pours black coffee for both of them.

They sit across from each other, drinking their coffee and not speaking.

Until.

Until Zelda gestures to the window with her cigarette, says,

“I suppose they’ve been trading campfire stories. Ghosts, etc.”

Hilda nods.

They’ve both been stories. They’ve both been ghosts. Yet here they are. Here. And corporeal. For now.

“The imagination of youth,” Hilda says.

But what is imagination? What is real?

Zelda remembers so much. But disparately. Large, detailed chunks punctuated by silent, amnesiac slices. Fog and chill and deja vu.

“Do you know any good ghost stories?” Zelda says.

“Afraid not, love. Seems I was always dead during them.”

Zelda’s eyes flick toward the coffee carafe and back to Hilda.

“Please don’t,” Hilda says evenly. “We have company.”

“Of course I wouldn’t. Just thinking I needed a warm up.”

Hilda rolls her eyes, tops off Zelda’s cup.

“What do you mean by that, sister? That you were always dead,” Zelda says, trying to be casual as she blows on her hot coffee.

“Just that most legends have…” Hilda is visibly thinking, searching for a word. “…rather mundane origins.”

Zelda considers, says,

“What is mundane to you?”

Hilda considers, says,

“Are you asking for an example or a definition?”

Zelda huffs, says,

“Neither. I’m asking for an aspirin.”

“Oh get it yourself.”

Hilda leaves her mug half-drunk, her pain au chocolat half-eaten, and heads toward the solarium.

x Last Saturday Evening x

Zelda wraps her white silk robe tighter around herself. It won’t stay tied. Not a uniquely silk problem but a problem nonetheless.

She pours a glug of bourbon from the crystal decanter onto Father’s grave. She hadn’t had enough hands or pockets to have also brought the Madeira that Mother and Edward had preferred. 

Libation liquor triage.

She makes her rounds and pays her respects. Not just to immediate family but generations. Headstones so weathered and moss-covered only rote memory recalls their names. There are many things she forgets or blends with dreams or fantasies, but anything learned by mnemonic device and drilling tends to stick with her.

It’s the pattern of visitation that reminds her in this case. A muscle memory in her quadriceps, burned into her at all the high witch holidays as Mother would drag her with one hand and with the other a little wagon filled with flowers to decorate the graves. They’d always had to be dressed in white for the occasion, somber and silent except for perhaps an intermittent mournful cry.

“You’re the eldest. It’s your duty.” A ghostly voice carried on the wind.

What else had been forced on her based on birth order alone?

She finishes, rests against a birch. She’s not dizzy yet, but another half hour yet and she will be. Maybe so dizzy as to fall into the Cain Pit herself. She nestles the crystal decanter in a pile of leaves near her feet and then lights a cigarette, lets her head fall back against the tree trunk.

“You ought to come to bed.” A ghostly voice carried on the wind. But then maybe not. She opens her eyes, turns her head.

Hilda is standing beside her. Corporeal, for now, in her white cotton nightdress. Deja vu but maybe not that, either.

“What do you care? My grief is mundane to you,” Zelda says. Hilda scoffs and takes up the decanter. She sniffs at it. She also prefers Madeira. But she takes a long pull as she stares into Zelda’s eyes.

“This isn’t about grief, and we both know it,” Hilda says. She takes another long pull and then corks the bottle, tucks it under her arm, starts off toward the house.

Zelda’s fingernails piercing bark.

“Wouldn’t you like to be alive for the ghost story for once?”

Hilda pauses. Turns. Says,

“If someone’s not dead, who’s the ghost?”

The front door bangs closed.

Zelda remains in the graveyard.

Zelda remains the ghost.


End file.
